Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday April 20, 2013 @11:45AM
from the for-your-own-protection-forever-and-ever-amen dept.

Should Boston have been put in a state of lockdown on Friday as police chased down Dzhokhar Tsarnaev? Pragmatic Bruce Schneier writes on his blog: "I generally give the police a lot of tactical leeway in times like this. The very armed and very dangerous suspects warranted extraordinary treatment. They were perfectly capable of killing again, taking hostages, planting more bombs -- and we didn't know the extent of the plot or the group. That's why I didn't object to the massive police dragnet, the city-wide lock down, and so on." Schneier links to some passionate counterarguments, though. It doesn't escape the originator of a recurring movie plot terrorism contest that the Boston events of yesterday were just "the sort of thing that pretty much only happens in the movies."

All this showed to me sadly was how quickly people are willing to give up their own freedoms because of fear. This is a sad slippery slope we are on. While this was a horrible event, only three people died, and the whole city got shut down. Three. How long till they lockdown the city because two people die. How long untill they lockdown the city because a gunshot was heard. Untill they come into our homes to look for suspects. And the worst part is, no one will even say "No". We will welcome them with open arms, and claim that we dont mind being being forced to stay indoors, to let police into our houses whenever they want, to be under constant surveillance, because there are "madmen" on the loose and we have to catch them. Its like a mass case of stockholm syndrome.

The authorities said "please stay inside, don't go to work or anything". Most people did, either because of the perceived danger (desperate fugitive with explosives and guns and a willingness, even perhaps a desire, to use them against random citizens) or because they wanted to do what little they could to help authorities catch the perpetrators of the marathon bombings.

Nobody got arrested for not staying inside. It was a temporary measure, and a ruinously expensive one in economic terms -- so they're not likely to do this again except in equally extreme situations.

Most people did, either because of the perceived danger (desperate fugitive with explosives and guns and a willingness, even perhaps a desire, to use them against random citizens) or because they wanted to do what little they could to help authorities catch the perpetrators of the marathon bombings.

Or the perceived danger of being mistakenly shot in the street by a trigger-happy militarized police force.

I would hardly say what the Boston PD and FBI did were the actions of a trigger happy police force. All in all it was a text book example of correct police work. They stayed on target and solved this case in record time. It was the media who gave the worst show. So let's not blame the authorities on the failure of the media.

Your hindsight analysis isn't really relevant to someone's fear about going outside (which is prior to said police work that you are analyzing in hindsight). Fact of the matter is police kill more innocent Americans every year (except one) than terrorists do. It's a valid fear, and hindsight-analysis of Boston PD and FBI after the fact doesn't make that fear unfounded, as it is founded in a far more general, verifiable truth.

That article doesn't back that assertion up. It just says it, and gives no proof. And it certainly doesn't specify who is killed by the police or where these are criminals who involve themselves in shootouts with the police, or innocent bystanders.

There is a huge difference between being a criminal shot by the police, and being an innocent attendee at a marathon, who is then killed by a bomb. Or being in the office and having a plane crash through the window.

I should probably have mentioned that I don't consider attacks against armed forces to count in my comparison, as we were talking about Boston civilians in their home. We are comparing the odds of a civilian (which I called "innocent" above, not the best word choice, sorry for poor form) being killed in a terror attack in america vs a civilian being killed by a policeman.

"From 1969 to 2009, the average number of fatalities per terrorist attack against a nation other than the United States yielded 1.74 fatalities. (See Chart 2.) When the data are limited to incidents against the United States, the average terrorist attack yielded 2.01 fatalities per incident. These fatalities represent all individuals killed, not only Americans. Without 9/11, the average falls to 0.97 fatalities per attack." [citation: i know these guys are assholes, but they do process some meaningful statistics [heritage.org]]

The problem is: How many incidents per year? The same page has a chart, the highest number of incidents in a year is 150. So we're talking about 301 people. But what is hard to get it: How many of these are military targets? I don't even consider terrorism possible against military: The very definition of terrorism, as far as i am concerned, is that you are killing innocents. Military are not innocents. They have opted to be put in harm's way. They also are not related to the original conversation here on slashdot about being fearful to go outside because Boston police might mistakenly shoot you.

Hard to say how many of these are military -- perhaps Rand has a Crystal Reports plugin somewhere where we can analyze the data further?

But wait! Further down the page, they talk about homegrown terrorism. The maximum per year was 2001 with 33 attacks. For 2007-2009 there were 3. On a bad year: 911, thousands of deaths. During some years, like 2007? Zero.

Please tell me I don't have to demonstrate that police have killed more than zero person in a year.:) 2007 is an easy win, if i were to cherry-pick.

" Since 1970, more than half of all international terrorist acts targeting the United States occurred in either Latin America and the Caribbean (36 percent) or Europe (23 percent). (See Chart 6.) The Middle East and Persian Gulf account for 20 percent. "

^You have to throw those out for the Boston comparison too.

Hopefully you do realize the police kill 150-400 unarmed people every year. Shootings are always found justified, because all that is needed to justify it is "I felt scared". Scared people with guns are something to be scared of. And there's a lot more of them than terrorists.

If you want to prove me wrong, you'll have to tell me why the National Security Council numbers are flawed. I am open to such a notion, but as you made me do your homework, you'd have to do mine this time;)

Just to be clear, "text book correct police work" is to chase a suspect through the night in a car, have them escape, lock down an entire city (not just the area they escaped, the entire city including public transport and air travel) except for dunkin donuts [boston.com], conduct completely fruitless door to door searches all day long, finally admit you aren't getting anywhere and then let the citizens find your suspect for you?

Did anyone else listen to this on a scanner? It's amazing how many times the dispatcher had to remind officers to exercise discipline and to follow the orders which they had been given. Apparently many officers felt compelled to converge on any suspected sighting, abandoning their assigned lookout posts. In general, I was impressed by the police response, but it was far below the standard that would be expected in many other cities.

I think your standard of the police force is a bit too high, especially the grunts. The specialized units like SWAT and the bomb squad, the higher ups, they're probably incredibly intelligent and expertly trained. The ones standing around at the street corners doing guard duty, not so much.

In my observation, the average grunt cop is intelligent enough, but incredibly narrow-minded. We're the cops, and everyone else are potential perps, to put it in a nutshell. Misuse of intelligence, one might call it.

I have to agree the Boston PD acted rationally and with the exception of not reading him his Miranda (somebody needs to be FIRED for screwing that up) they acted VERY professionally.

For an example of cops more dangerous than the bad guy see the LAPD when that former cop was shooting cops, how many innocent people did they shoot again? 3? 4? I lost count it was bad enough that bloggers in the area were saying if you were a black man or drove a blue truck you had better stay indoors because they were emptying the gun first THEN seeing if it was the guy. Compared to that thumbs up Boston PD.

Since when is "ruinously expensive" an obstacle for the government? A couple of months ago Massachusetts locked down the roads of the entire state, threatening drivers with arrest, for a fairly typical winter storm. This kind of thing is already becoming the new normal, just like it's become normal for police to be indistinguishable from combat soldiers.

I doubt a whole day's economic output was actually destroyed. Certainly, there was some loss --- but a lot of economic activity just ends up being moved to the day(s) after. If you can't buy groceries on one day, your family probably doesn't eat a day's less of food; you just make a slightly bigger grocery run the next day. Goods scheduled to be delivered aren't tossed in a pile and incinerated. Yes, there will be marginal inefficiencies created, but I suspect that far less than (annual economic output)/365 was lost.

Very few companies of any sort are running at 100% capacity all the time, and limited in their output by the number of hours in the day --- basically, whenever someone hits this point, it's profitable for them (or a competitor) to expand operations, until economic output is limited by how many units (of whatever one is producing; goods or services) one can sell at positive margins instead of how much can be produced at maximum capacity in a day. At worst, you have to spend a tiny bit more on overtime pay (a

Wow - you felt like this was the right time to beat the "tort reform" horse?

Dead civilians, dead cops, and you pulled that hoary old saw out of your trove of political hobbyhorses?

By the way - you can let it go.

Visit China or Mexico or India. The courts have no power over the rich in those places, and safety measures are considered a foreign luxury. If while at work on the assembly line, you lose your hand en la Máquina then there's no system at work to tell anyone it should have had a simple safety feature to keep your hand out - you were the careless one, after all - so you just go on the street to beg with your other hand, with the crowd of other one-handed people. Your life is worth less than the little money and effort a bit of safety engineering would cost, in those places.

Oh, for the millions of people it benefits, a small percentage of people abuse it - just like health insurance, taking fake sick days at work, the welfare system, the military procurement system, and every other human system ever invented, except at least in the case of torts, you have to fool both a judge and a jury to do it. It's actually one of the least abusable systems we have. If only everything else worked that way.

And yet, propagandists will try to convince you to be riled up over someone who got a jury award in a courtroom because they want to distract you from a banker who got a bonus on a bailed out bank, or bribery in congress, or a drug company who thinks quality control is a big government intrusion onto their profits.

Even that lady who got millions for spilling McDonalds coffee on herself... didn't get millions for spilling coffee on herself. She got $640k, in the end, because McDonalds decided to serve coffee 40 degrees hotter than everyone else, and when it spilled on her lap, she suffered horrific agony, massive burns on her vagina, needed skin grafts, and her medical treatments continued for two years. McDonalds already knew they were injuring hundreds of people like her, and even paid out up to half a million in the past in settlements, but they couldn't be bothered to tell people to turn down the knob in the coffee makers to where everyone else sets it. And the manager of that particular location was a douche, and decided "no one should get money for spilling coffee." Well, if you make it hot enough, you do injure people, to the point where it shocks the conscience. (reference [wikipedia.org]) Amazingly after this case the knobs got turned down and the coffee went to normal temperature and everyone stopped getting hurt.

This is why I say you can let it go. Get outraged about legal bribery (Citizens United, etc), bank bailouts and billions of military budget dollars wasted and lost that was supposed to go support our troops. If you really hold on to tort reform so much that it seems relevant in the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings, go live in one of the many earthly paradises that has no tort, and see for yourself what it's like.

Lawyers removed the right to be an idiot by suing the state every time a moron hurts themselves, see my previous post on the "lawsuit lotto" as an example. why do you think it feels like the state is trying to baby proof the planet? because the relatives of every Darwin award winner promptly sues the state for not keeping Cleetus from hurting his poor dumb ass.

The lockdown wasn't put into place after the bombings. It was enacted after the murder of a security guard, robbery, carjacking, a shootout with ~200 rounds of ammo, one of the suspects blowing himself up, and the other escaping into the neighborhood with who-knows-what for intentions or weapons.

That, combined with the lockdown happening on a Friday (hey, 'free' day off of work!), and it doesn't shock me that people were willing to comply for a day.

You forgot both suspects tossing bombs and grenades at the police and at random as they drove around.

Personally those two turned that area into a war zone. While the "whole city" was on lockdown. the bulk of it was just mass transit being shut down. I went to work yesterday. Our delivery drivers were out and about around the city of Boston on Friday.

Sure it was shut down. but for 90% of it was a day off of work only couple of square miles were actually lockdown hard.

And they found the guy after they lifted the lockdown and people started looking around for damage.

I just cringe at the thought of someone who's life was affected reading some of the comments in this discussion.

Far more lives were affected by the lockdown than by the bombing itself. Who are these hypothetical "someone"s you speak of? The victims' families?

You can't predict an individual's reaction any more than I can -- I can only predict my own. I'll tell you this: Civil panic would be a horrible way to "honor" the death of one of my loved ones. Speaking only for myself -- the only person I can speak for -- I would find no offense, and perhaps even some small glimmer of comfort, in my community and country opting to follow the British war slogan: "Keep calm, and carry on".

Far more lives were affected by the lockdown than by the bombing itself. Who are these hypothetical "someone"s you speak of? The victims' families?

I meant affected in a non-trivial way. My life has been "affected" by reading about it, and someone who was advised to stay indoors while they caught the suspects was "affected", but to say your life has been affected by it in a way that can be counted against someone who had a leg blown off is an insult.

Civil panic would be a horrible way to "honor" the death of one of my loved ones.

Civil panic being "Please stay indoors while we finish chasing down the other person who did this to your loved ones" ? I guess in that situation you would probably have places you need to be though, and wh

Civil panic would be a horrible way to "honor" the death of one of my loved ones. Speaking only for myself -- the only person I can speak for -- I would find no offense, and perhaps even some small glimmer of comfort, in my community and country opting to follow the British war slogan: "Keep calm, and carry on".

You do know that the British took shelter during air raids, don't you? Apparently not - you would apparently consider that a cop out and civil panic. Unless you have a very good reason (antiaircraft crew, civil defense staff) you take shelter during the air raid. Unless you have a very good reason, you stay away from gun battles and man hunts. You don't keep running the buses and offer the terrorist a gift of 60 hostages to soak up the ball bearings in his suicide vest!

Here is a hint: For the ordinary person, the real test comes after the event is over. Do you return to normal life? Do you hold the next marathon? Do you ride the bus again if a suicide bomber blew himself up on your bus route yesterday. The test is not do you keep running the busses in a area of an active manhunt and firefight so you can have another memorial service after the detonation of another suicide vest.

*In between* air raids, they were asked to "keep calm and carry on" - and that's a reasonable request. But in the middle of an emergency, they weren't being told "Pop over to the cafe for a spot of tea and crumpet while the bombs fall, don't let that Luftwaffe ruin your day!" They were being told, "take shelter, and turn out your lights.

I live in Boston and I don't see what "freedoms" I just gave up. This was a one-time deal; it does not have to be the standard response for every event. If a police lockdown became overkill and burdensome for some set of circumstances, and possibly encouraging to terrorists, then residents would let their officials know that they need to lighten up in the future. This was not one of those times.

Sometimes you guys seem so intent on spinning off on your political abstractions that common sense is ignored. The lockdown made it a lot easier for law enforcement to do their jobs without worrying about crowd control, collateral damage, the suspect blending into the street scene, etc. And the police did do an excellent job.

Which doesn't make the lockdown make any less sense. As it turned out the thinking was correct; the suspect was on the loose hiding at someones house. The guy was pretty lucky that the second suspect was shot up; otherwise had the suspect been more aware he could easily have killed the guy when he went to look in the boat. Happily it didn't turn out that way.

Thats why the suspect was found AFTER the lockdown, by a guy walking around outside his house.

That doesn't actually mean that the lockdown had no effect. At the end of the lockdown, more people than usual were in very familiar territory (home vs. work or transit); everyone was vigilant and focused. Had there not been a lockdown, maybe the "background noise" of daily comings and goings would have been enough to mask the guy's escape.

to put things in perspective, guns kill about 100 people per day in the US.

1) Bullshit. The actual number is 8,000-10,000 per year, which is of course too much, but less than 1/3 your claim.

2) Bullshit. 25-30 per day in a country of over 300,000,000 are spread out among isolated incidents which police have very little chance of preventing. In Boston, they had a single attacker, shooting at multiple people, and throwing multiple bombs, in a small known area, in a short time, and ***EVERY*** reason in the world to believe that he would continue his attempts at murdering more people until the moment he was captured or killed.

20,000 of those were suicides. Since the US suicide rate is comparable to other countries [wikipedia.org] it seems that those people would commit suicide anyway by other means if a gun weren't available. It is dishonest to include this statistic in a gun regulation debate.

Out of the remaining 10,000, take out those committed by felons (who are banned from owning guns anyway) who wouldn't care about any gun laws, plus justifiable homicides in self-defense by citizens and by the police, and you find that number beginning to look far less impressive.

Then you have to decide if the number of deaths is the only criteria to consider. Is it better to increase the rape statistics by one or to add a dead rapist to the "gun death" statistic? You can "improve" all kinds of statistics very easily: banning driving over 5 mph with 20 years prison penalty for violations would overnight save 10s of thousands of lives each year. Killing a healthy person and harvesting his organs to save 5 dying patients would improve statistics too - 1 death is better than 5, right?

Then, even the proponents of Feinstein/Obama style gun laws (such as banning black plastic guns but allowing brown wooden ones, limiting capacity etc) would admit in the end that they won't make a single bit of difference. After all, those exact same laws were tried before by Clinton so its not like we don't know.

Finally, none of the above matters. It's a basic human right to defend one's own life and the lives of one's family and the only way to do that realistically is by owning a gun. By denying someone that right you are denying them their basic humanity and treating them as interchangeable part of a machine, to be sacrificed if needed as long as the machine as a whole would benefit as measured by some statistic.

No, leave the suicides in. 90% of people who attempt suicide by firearm die on their first attempt. People who attempt suicide by other means almost always fail (most try yo use drugs; 97% survive). And after a failed attempt, only a small minority of people attempt again. So, no. If those 20,000 people didn't have access to firearms, the very large majority may have tried to kill themselves by another means, would have failed, never tried again )or tried and failed again), and be alive today.

Absolutely. And it wasn't just the lockdown of the whole city, but also a "public safety exception" voiding the constitutional right to have a lawyer. I think we witnessed an object lesson in history. How did fascism take over Germany? One perfectly justifiable step after another. Why didn't people object? Only few did and all the others said "shut up".

There is no Constitutional right to have a lawyer during questioning, only a Constitutional right not to have any statements you make during such questioning introduced at trial. Since they have ample other evidence by which to convict Tsarnaev without using any such statements, there is no particular reason to Mirandize him. We can just accept that the statements made without advising him of his rights are not admissible in court.

By spreading panic by making absurd claims about how their lifestyle was being destroyed by the powers that be, thus necessiating a revolution to return to their glorious mythical past. You know, a bit like you're doing here.

In retrospect, it's interesting that the bomber didn't kill more people when they actually had the chance. During their escape, they held up a convenience store and stole a car --- without shooting the robbery victims. An interesting artifact of human psychology, even at its most twisted: the terrorists willing to blow up random strangers weren't willing to look a shopkeeper or driver in the eye and shoot them; in panicked flight and personal contact with potential victims, they showed far more restraint and respect for human life than their premeditated impersonal cold-blooded murders just hours before.

> You're proposing that people be told it's safe to go> about their business as usual even though a> dangerous person is out there.

There's always a dangerous *something* out there. And yes, I do go about my business as usual.

I am, for example, *FAR* more likely to be run down by a taxi or MUNI bus while crossing the street downtown than I am to be killed in any kind of terrorist attack. And yet, I still leave the house every day, cross streets, ride busses, subways, and streetcars; and even drive in the city in the cases when public transit is unworkable. I even go out clubbing or bar-hopping at night and cross the street and walk down the sidewalk when it's quite likely that there are motorists driving around inebriated. All of those activities present far more danger to me than "teh terrorists" do. And yet I don't cower in my home in fear of an errant motor vehicle.

Averaging over the whole country for the whole year, you are (as you noted) far, far more likely to be killed by something "mundane" like a car. However, on the day and in the neighborhood where a desperate fugitive (who's already shown a propensity for killing people) is loose, the odds are significantly shifted. Shutting down too large an area (e.g. a whole gigantic city) might be on the excessive side (where the specific danger is "lost in the noise" of regular daily harms); however, extra caution in a narrower area (e.g. locking down a university campus or suburb) may be well-justified in terms of risk mitigation, where the risk of being harmed within that specific geographic and time window is drastically higher than the long-term regional average risks of daily living.

So, making sure officers on an intensive stakeout can get a quick calorie boost is a bad thing (herp derp, cops and donuts!)? Would it have been better to tell the police force "everyone go grab lunch in a far-away safe location, and be back in two hours"? Or, should the police force maintain their own mobile food preparation facilities, so they're ready to bring their own snack trucks to the site of once-in-a-few-years major operations? Keeping a close-by source of quick-energy-rush stay-awake food availab

I am, for example, *FAR* more likely to be run down by a taxi or MUNI bus while crossing the street downtown than I am to be killed in any kind of terrorist attack.

Massachusetts averages less than one traffic fatality per day [census.gov]. If you were in the Boston area yesterday, it would not be an unreasonable calculation to think the risk of being killed by a terrorist - who was known to be armend, dangerous and in the immediate vicinity - was at least as high and potentially much higher than that of being run down while driving or crossing the street.

A known threat, that had already killed 3 people is quite a bit different then the non specific possibility of a threat. Yes on a daily basis you are more likely to get killed on a bus. But on a day when a mad bomber is loose in a city those statistics may shift a bit.

But the only reason the Boston count was not higher than Baghdad was that there were so many medical personal literally right there at the scene.

The Boston attack was in a much more crowded area, during an event with a lot more media coverage. Why is it any surprise it would get more coverage? It does in fact deserve more coverage, as tragic as those other things are.

That said the Texas explosion does deserve more coverage than it is getting, and more sym

Correct, though the people may deserve some sympathy what is needed from our politicians is an investigation as to why this plant was allowed to flaunt safety regulations. The greatest respect we can show the victims of the West Texas accident is to hold those responsible accountable, from the owners of the plant to the regulators who failed to perform the required inspections.

West Texas was completely preventable, and a failure of regulatory oversight.

... investigation as to why this plant was allowed to flaunt safety regulations. (emphasis added)

Flaunt means to display proudly or ostentatiously, such as one might do after buying a new sports car. To flaunt safety regulations means you have put up a big colourful poster with the text of the regulations and maybe have a big sign saying "We're better than everyone else because we follow safety regulations!"

All not getting your miranda rights mean is that they can't use anything you say against you. Given that these assholes were on video and openly engaged in violence there really is no need for the survivor to have his testimony used against him. They know what he did and the proof is ridiculously overwhelming. The public safety exception is for any continuing violence that may happen such as booby traps and such he left. This and any other accomplices are what they want to question about at this time, n

I don't know if you're aware of this or not but if a guy is holding a gun and shooting at police with it they can kill him and no one except the occasional crackpot will have much to say about it. If he points a gun at police and they shoot him there might be a minor investigation but that is about it. Shooting a terrorist who is armed and actively hostile is not an execution.

Two devices went off, police were looking for two suspects... there was no particularly strong evidence that there would be dozens of people out there or something. I suspect it comes down to just the word "terrorism" causing people to refuse to apply the kind of logic they normally apply.

I've lived in neighborhoods where people were shot, and the gunman was an fugitive. It was more likely in those cases that there could be wider involvement of a larger group, because often people who perpetrate shootings are gang members. While it's rare, occasionally these fugitive scenarios actually do end up in a shootout that involves a dozen people. Yet, the police don't lock down all of Atlanta every other week just in case.

Two devices went off, police were looking for two suspects... there was no particularly strong evidence that there would be dozens of people out there or something. I suspect it comes down to just the word "terrorism" causing people to refuse to apply the kind of logic they normally apply.

I've lived in neighborhoods where people were shot, and the gunman was an fugitive. It was more likely in those cases that there could be wider involvement of a larger group, because often people who perpetrate shootings are gang members. While it's rare, occasionally these fugitive scenarios actually do end up in a shootout that involves a dozen people. Yet, the police don't lock down all of Atlanta every other week just in case.

I think the key here is predictability. Neighbourhood criminals have known haunts. We were dealing with people who were extremely mobile and armed with explosives. We didn't know who their partners in crime (if any) were, we didn't know where they were likely to go. They had been located in downtown Boston, Cambridge, and Watertown. Their last known location was Watertown, and that's where the actual door-to-door searching was going on, but the danger was that they'd break free and head in a random directi

I see your point, and the issue is partially terrorism. Note that Boston was not locked down until the terrorists surfaced again, and until there was a realization that they had additional bombs

I will just make two statements here. FIrst, if people had been roaming around as normal, then there would have a chance that that a person with a bomb could have taken many hostages and, theoretically, escaped or caused much more damage. Two, by not keeping everyone at home, it became easy to check on those who

If two people with makeshift bombs can cause a major city to go on lockdown, isn't the message to terrorists that a multi-city disruption -- say, shutting down from Boston to Philly -- wouldn't take very many people or that much coordination?

If two people with makeshift bombs can cause a major city to go on lockdown, isn't the message to terrorists thatmedia multi-city disruption -- say, shutting down from Boston to Philly -- wouldn't take very many people or that much coordination?

Where are my mod points!?

Regardless of constitutional issues, this is the central lesson learned by terrorist wannabes due to this event.

It wouldn't take much imagination to see even small two man teams in different population centers to disrupt the entire eastern seaboard by bombing Christmas shopping or major sports events or campaign rallies or whatever.

"Shelter in Place" could become a phrase we come to detest. Especially if the nanny statists decided to let social media solve all crimes in the future.

It wouldn't take much imagination to see even small two man teams in different population centers to disrupt the entire eastern seaboard by bombing Christmas shopping or major sports events or campaign rallies or whatever.

If two people with makeshift bombs can cause a major city to go on lockdown, isn't the message to terrorists that a multi-city disruption -- say, shutting down from Boston to Philly -- wouldn't take very many people or that much coordination?

Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Terrorists fixate on certain targets, such as airplanes. We all know that if you wanted to disrupt air transportation these days, the airplane itself is one of the least vulnerable targets, but they keep focusing on the airplanes.

As for the stupid part, Wile E. Coyote could do better than most of them.

Only where something new and radical is tried do they tend to have success, and that generally isn't repeatable. We

Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Terrorists fixate on certain targets, such as airplanes. We all know that if you wanted to disrupt air transportation these days, the airplane itself is one of the least vulnerable targets, but they keep focusing on the airplanes.

There are excellent reasons for them fixating on airplanes. If you tale a look at the history of non-vehicle suicide bombings, you'll find they rarely kill more than a dozen or so peopl

Our only real defense against terrorists is that terrorists are A) stupid and B) incompetent. Only where something new and radical is tried do they tend to have success, and that generally isn't repeatable. We adapt. They don't.

Wrong on all counts.Read the news just once in a while.All the 9/11 terrorists were college educated. Pretty competent for what they planned to do.There are terrorist bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan almost weekly. The toll is seldom less than 50 people. Pretty repeatable if you ask me.

I'll give you half marks. Education is not the same thing as intelligence, as numerous degree-bearing idiots in my field demonstrate on a daily basis. Furthermore, "stupid" in this context means simply that they are unwilling to adapt. Plenty of high-IQ people do stupid things.

It is true that overseas suicide bombings take a horrendous toll, but they are almost exclusively limited to regions that are unstable. Relatively few such attacks are attempted in "civilized" countries, except, perhaps for Russia. Wh

They did too! That's exactly what they did! I don't even live in Boston but I'm contacting ACLU and am going to sue them for violating my right to not be inconvenienced.

It cost them a marginal amount of money (people will do their shopping and make up the work on Monday). People were asked and willingly stayed inside but some where inconvenienced probably, surely, well... I haven't actually heard anyone complain or anything but I'm sure someone was.

Even with some fairly powerful explosives, a packed crowd, and no forewarning of the authorities they only killed three people. Yes they wounded many more and sadly a lot of people lost limbs, but again that is not the goal of terrorism, they want death.

I would beg to differ, maiming people is in many ways far more effective as terror than killing people. The dead will have a funeral, maybe the odd memorial but the crippled will go around the rest of their lives as living reminders of the Boston Marathon bombings, make for tons of heart breaking scenes and be a huge drain on medical and other resources. There is a reason even the Geneva Convention banned weapons that are "excessively injurious" as an inhumane way to fight a war even when outright killing e

A couple of people execute a plan to blow hundreds of innocent athlete/spectators' limbs off,

The police use technology to work with the public to catch/kill them in a matter of days with no additional casualties,

Some Americans then go wallow in self-hatred over either

How scared they are of the police intruding on their freedom,

Or how easily scared they are.

I can't believe people are saying to the effect of "only three people died, less than the deaths caused by normal crime." Surely there is a difference between those looking to maim hundreds of innocent people and the sum of everyday crime?
How can people be so wishy-washy about this? A couple of complete assholes have just ruined hundreds of peoples' lives, and people feel conflicted about the manhunt that ended in their death and arrest?

I feel no conflict. I thought this one of the few times I've seen government act effectively. I was pretty impressed by the way the officials in Boston handled the situation and especially the way local, state and federal agencies acted in concert. My congratulations to my Northern neighbors on a job well done.

Maybe, but notice that the fear was created, not by terrorist, but by:
1) Politicians scoring a cheap leadership point, and
2) The media pushing ads with a "good" story,

This might very well have been way out of proportions.
I think the politicians eat it because it was great chance to show leadership, and the media loved the idea of doing live coverage for hours on end...

End result, more fear... but I'm not sure it was the terrorist who scared you.

The guy was found when they let people out of their houses and one of them stumbled across the guy. If they had let people out earlier would he have been found earlier? Funny thing is if they had waited until night to lift the ban he might have slipped away.

What's more consider what happened. The people hid from one militant guy. Compare this to 1776 when British militants walked on a town. Citizens decided to gather together to oppose them despite the risk to their lives (, and many did die ). Boy how this country has changed.

I wouldn't really say that most people were *hiding* -- that is, I don't think they were staying inside due to fear of the bad guy -- but rather trying to let the professionals (the police and federal agents) who were searching for this very dangerous bad guy to do their job with the least interference and confusion possible.

The people hid from one militant guy. Compare this to 1776 when British militants walked on a town. Citizens decided to gather together to oppose them despite the risk to their lives (, and many did die ). Boy how this country has changed.

You'e conflating the term "militant" with "military". The Boston Massacre (which turns out to have been no such thing - in actuality, the British soldiers were fired on from the crowd, which means they returned fire in self-defense - but the winners get to write the histories), known to the British as the Incident on King Street, occurred on March 5, 1770, when a detachment of eight British soldiers was sent to defend a sentry, Private Hugh White, who was surrounded by a mob of se

The worst outcome is that lockdowns are becoming more and more common, far out of proportion to the actual risk. Once it becomes normal to lock down an entire city in response to a very real and significant threat, it then becomes much easier to feel normal about it when we lock down an entire college campus because a mentally ill homeless person made some faculty or staff uncomfortable. It becomes normal to do what some community colleges in my area are doing, which is to have an active shooter drill once a year in which adult college students are locked in a dark room for 30 minutes and told they can't leave. (This passive response is, BTW, not at all in line with what experts recommend in such a situation.)

Destroying 30 minutes of instruction for a whole campus and violating students' civil rights is way out of proportion to the risk of getting killed by an active shooter, which for a college student is on the order of 1 in 300,000 per year. A college student's risk of being a victim of rape, robbery, or assault is about 1 in 100 per year, but we're uncomfortable dealing with that -- in fact, there is a wave of lawsuits right now by women who say their rights were violated when their colleges refused to take action about their being raped.

To use an analogy suggested by Scheneier, active shooters and the marathon bombing are like shark attacks, and other violent crimes are like dog bites. The number of people killed by dogs every year is much, much greater than the number killed by sharks. But we find shark attacks much more psychologically compelling.

This entire thing was ridiculous and made so by the police. 2 men shut down one of the largest cities on earth. These sorts of attacks happen all the time most other parts of the world. Imagine living in Israel or Syria. If they ever get 20 guys again like 9/11 and they all just get rifles and randomly start shooting people all over the country like the Washington sniper did this countries going to become a police state if the police react like this. More people were killed in Massachusetts in the past week in car accidents then by these bombers. Where was the police presence to prevent those fatalities? Oh, that's right, they were busy firing thousands of rounds at a 2 guys in a residential neighborhood.

If they ever get 20 guys again like 9/11 and they all just get rifles and randomly start shooting people all over the country like the Washington sniper did this countries going to become a police state if the police react like this.

Right; more people are killed by car accidents every day than by 20 snipers taking out people at random across the country. I say in that situation the police should ignore the snipers and go look for drunk drivers and speeding!

Frankly until terrorists are killing more people within the US than cancer and heart disease put together, I don't see much point going after it.

In light of the potential outcome of option 4 (which based on what these psychopaths did before and during capture was altogether probable) risk-averse structures, like governments, will choose to over-react every time.

There is a continuum on a scale that goes from "I have my own rights and I don't care about anyone else" to "What the individual wants isn't important, it's only the common good that matters." Most of us dislike both extremes and find our beliefs somewhere between the two. In this case, most residents thought the emergency and very temporary needs of their community were significantly more important than their own personal convenience and voluntarily complied with a request to stay in for part of a day. See

Another one for the "The Anarchist Cookbook?" I wasn't aware of O2F2..:-?

The formula that better describes its properties is FOOF. You can read a very entertaining description of its synthesis and properties here [corante.com]. Comparing FOOF to the stuff from "The Anarchist Coockbook" is like comparing Saturn 5 rocket to a firecracker. Yes they both blow up, but FOOF can make water explode at subzero temperatures. Here is a quote from Stern, AG, The Chemical Properties of Dioxygen Difluoride, JACS 1963: